A Survey on Interior Textiles at İzmir Atatürk House Museum

Tülay Gümüşer

doi:10.17484/yedi.842825

Abstract

This study deals with the interior textiles of the house that Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Republic of Turkey, used as headquarters and resided for a short period of time. Interior textiles in the house museum provide a useful framework for understanding how home culture was shaped, experienced, and imagined in that period. Interior textiles in a house museum provide a rich source for researchers to get background information. These textiles can be original, non-original or replicas. During the research, it was found out that the original upholstery fabrics were replaced with the fabrics that did not match with the original ones as a result of the restoration of Atatürk House Museum. For this reason, the research was carried out with the non-original textiles. Here, the critical question is “Do the non-original textiles fail to reflect the spirit of a nation or a personal taste?”. This study investigates the connection between the non-original textiles and the early republic period. Within the scope of the research, the researcher has interpreted the design features and upholstery fabrics of one armchair, one sofa and three chairs, which stand in the drawing room, bedroom, dining hall and meeting hall.

Highlights

IntroductionDemHist as an International Committee of the Council of Museums (ICOM) declared house museums as a new research field in museology, identifying their historical, artistic, cultural, and social aspects
Giovanni Pinna who is one of the founders of DemHist, defines historical house museums as: Historic houses, when they are open to the public and conserved in their original condition and have not been converted to accommodate the collections from different sources, constitute a museum category of a special and a rather kind
This paper aims to fill this gap in historical literature in line with İzmir Atatürk House Museum which belong to the early Republic period

Summary

Introduction

DemHist as an International Committee of the Council of Museums (ICOM) declared house museums as a new research field in museology, identifying their historical, artistic, cultural, and social aspects. This committee aimed at creating a system, as one of its first projects, for classifying the historic house museums with a homogenous museological line. Giovanni Pinna who is one of the founders of DemHist, defines historical house museums as: Historic houses, when they are open to the public and conserved in their original condition (i.e. with the furnishing and collections made by the people who used to live in them) and have not been converted to accommodate the collections from different sources, constitute a museum category of a special and a rather kind. The historic house is certainly incomparable and unique museum in that it is used to conserve, exhibit or reconstruction real atmospheres which are difficult to manipulate (to very slight extent) if one does not wish to alter the meaning very of historic house. (2001, p. 4-‐‐9; Savaş, 2010, p. 146)

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